The art at Grålum School should fulfil several desired criteria and give the users an art experience in their school day:
– The art emphasizes the entrance and the internal and external common spaces.
– The art gives the place and attraction and identity
– The art confers an artistic quality to the place
– The art is thought provoking
– The art communicates to youth
In the competition brief three areas were identified for possible decoration; The North and Southern entrances and the common space in the foyer/canteen, amphitheatre and gallery that bind the two entrances together.
We were free to choose suitable places for the art within the limitations of these three areas.
The school was already built, which meant that the art would need to be mounted in an existing environment of designed features and objects that could not be changed, and the art would need to stand amongst and relate to these features.
How to visualise movement?
Through drawing we can visualise that which we don’t see; visualise thoughts, several simultaneous movements, dreams and absurd things that can’t possibly occur….
Ping-Pong is an imagined movement, an imagined energy- an imagined, but recognisable, game that has the school as its arena, outside our normal scale and conception of time.
Where this imagined action comes into contact with building, as the Ping-Pong ball rushes though the school, marks appear. The residual track is a still of an event, visualised through drawings that become 3 dimensional and materialised.
Process and sketches – several steps
I sketched my way though the thought process using the volume of the school as my drawing paper.
Keywords for my primary thought process:
– the school is so open that one could play Ping-Pong throughout
– the playing field, the table, are the vertical walls
– the plot/ the event is a comic strip
– the expression is drawn, yet it is 3 dimensional
– slightly secretive, not intrusively clear.
Ping Pong is a metaphor.
Ping Pong – extract of the project description >>
Ping Pong – press >>
